Facebook continues to extend its global social-networking hegemony, having established itself as the most-used such service in the vast majority of countries surveyed in a recent study.
"Facebook with 1 billion active users has established its leadership position in 127 out of 137 countries analyzed," blogged Italian …

You could say the same about most social networks though so unless you can argue why the ratio of fake:real accounts is substantially higher on FB (other than on strict sites which demand real-ID verification) this doesn't appear to change anything.

I would argue that Facebook has a higher percentage of active accounts than a typical forum where it's probably no higher than 10%. St Helena could be a good indication. I bet Facebook might even have 20% active accounts.

STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE

facebook is like a toilet at the festival. you and your friends fill it with shit to the point that you feel sickened whenever you visit so you put off going as long as possible but inevitably you have to but there's no flush only a like button.

that was the best analogy i could come up with, the like-being-raped-as-a-child wasn't appropriate.

As a slight tangent.....

With those festival toilets, when you get to the Monday and look in and see the turd pile rising magnificently over the rim by a good 8 inches, it always occured to me that some previous cutomer had opened the door, seen the pile a mere 4 inches above the horizon and thought to themselves "I can fit another one on there...." and presumably then carried out a feat of ninja-like balancing well beyond most Monday festival attendees in order to lay the final crest of 'mount feeshus' without also creating arse dimps on the summit.

Re: As a slight tangent.....

The festival toilet analogy fits perfectly, but it must be said you haven't really lived until you've experienced the visitors toilet in the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs at Lok Nayak Bhawan in Delhi on a really hot (47C) June day. I had thought I'd seen the ultimate in unsanitary sanitary facilities at the Stonehenge festivals in the 80's, but after spending every day for a week at LNB waiting for a signature on some papers and experiencing Toilet Fear every time my stomach twitched convinced me I'd finally seen the true Heart Of Darkness. If facebook gets that bad, we really do have problems.

Re: Hmmm....

Facebook's high water mark

There was a study reported on here (last year I think) which suggested that facebook's user base flattened out and didn't exceed 50 percent in any of the countries in which it operates, which puts its supposed dominance into perspective. Since not all of that 50 percent will be 'active' users, it rather punctures the notion of inevitability that seems to drive a good deal of facebooks takeup; people signing up because everyone else has. If "everyone else" turns out to be a good deal less than half the population, you're still on the right side of herd instinct by saying "get fucked Zuck".

Yahoo looked pretty unstoppable in 1998, but once Google had pissed on its solitary useful trick, the game was up bar a long decline. We've seen facebook's solitary (apparently) useful offering to date, connecting people, and I seriously doubt it can repeat the trick sufficiently to retain the user base it has, let alone attract the refuseniks, so I'd personally bet on a long slow decline to irrelevance, dragged out only by wishful thinking from the ad pimps and a wad of cash.

I zoomed the map

"Active" users

Ok, so I open my own facebook page occasionaly, just to pick up some message by our family members who live abroad. All games are blocked, all other "friends" are unsubscribed, if ever I post something myself (once a year?) I make sure only a very select set of family members get to see it - as far as the settings in FB work - which they probably don't.

I suppose I'm being considered as an "active" user too?

Funny thing is I never refuse a friend request, they all get added to my "Nothing personal" group, from where they can see nothing, and I also can't be bothered by them. At least to them, I look like the inactive user that I really am I suppose.

Re: Don't be one of the sheep!

NomNomNom "festival toilet" analogy is very good and is applicable to any social networking medium, even the so called 'professional' ones like linkedin.

However there is no getting away from the fact that social networking is here to stay, I'm happy to say that the friends I have on farcebook are real friends or are ex-colleagues and farcebook is a very convenient medium for keeping in touch despite the real friend who is a conspiracy theorist, but then I put up with that when I worked with him. It really depends on whether you want to open your "festival toilet" to everyone or just to your close friends who are going to respect it.

large numbers of facebook users

What else is there?

My own use of Facebook has been dropping off recently - I only use it for pictures or planning events really. However I don't see anything else to go to - If I go google plus then half my friends aren't on it - and it ties me even more into the Google environment. At least being Google(Android) and Facebook I can count on them to compete with each other and not share too much data between themselves.

I used to quite like Flickr - but the big problems of having to get people to sign up if I wanted to control access to photos killed that and I liked to tag people in it with metadata which it didn't support then.

I may be alone in these comments in wanting some kind of Social Media but what else is there?

However I suspect that my age (39) means I'm drifting out of the group that Facebook and the others are marketing to anyway.

Re: What else is there?

You can share stuff from Google Plus to people via their email address.

This is one big advantage of G Plus - I have members of my extended family in my Family circle and not all of them are on G Plus. But I can add my mother-in-law to the circle just with her email address. That way - when I share pics of the litt'luns she gets an email through with a link to the pics.

The circles idea is nice and easy to use. It means that if I share pics of the kids I can share them with family only and not with friends/associates who wouldn't be interested in them.

Re: What?... No....

Korea?

The 2009 map shows South Korea in Blue (Facebook dominent) and the 2012 map shows it red (QZone dominant). This is the only territory on the map that I can see that has moved away from Facebook in that time. It's a large, rich, and culturally sophisticated country, too. Has South Korea really moved to a Chinese controlled social network in the last three years? I wouldn't have thought this likely.

Irony...

Fundamental conflict, Facebook is not the final answer

Users want to share with those they want to share with. They want to limit who sees what, control what can be done with Their Stuff.

Social networks want to share everyone's stuff with everyone. They make more money whoring your data to all and sundry. It's a fundamental conflict for which the best we can hope is a compromise. Unfortunately, Faceborg goes way overboard, with blatant disregard for users.

Social networking is here to stay, but it does NOT have to be the creepy, F-ck You style that Facebook is becoming reviled for. Every unstoppable giant eventually falls hard, their turn will come. Not soon enough though...